Rushforth captures 2013 Merle Curti Award

KudosAssociate professor of history and director of Graduate Studies for the History Department Brett Rushforth received the Merle Curti Award from Al Camarillo, president of the Organization of American Historians, last Saturday in San Francisco.
Michael Regoli, Organization of American Historians

William & Mary’s Brett
Rushforth, author of “Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New
France,” was awarded the 2013 Merle Curti Award for the best book published in American social history Saturday night by the Organization of American Historians (OAH).

Associate professor of history and director of Graduate Studies for the
History Department, Rushforth said he was “absolutely thrilled to win the
prize.”

“The book took a great deal of time to research and write,” he said. “And,
frankly, I was thrilled because so many of the historical works that I deeply
admire are Curti winners and I’m honored to now be in that special group.”

Rushforth spent 12 years researching and writing “Bonds,” beginning in
1999. Information was gleaned from 20 different archives in Canada, France, the
United States and the Caribbean. He translated manuscripts from French,
developed a working knowledge of Algonquin and pored through the centuries-old
recordings of Jesuit missionaries.

The Curti awards committee was understandably impressed.

The book “provides a stunning
reconstruction of the Indian slave trade and slavery in new France in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” they wrote. “Bursting with archival
richness and interdisciplinary insights from historical linguistics and
anthropology, ‘Bonds of Alliance’ shows
how the French and their Indian allies hammered out a unique hybrid of
indigenous and Atlantic slaveries over decades of war, diplomacy, commerce, and
social fusion.

“Rushforth significantly expands
the conventional historical geography of slavery in colonial North America from
the eastern rim into Indian country, and he integrates this larger world into a
broader transatlantic context of ideas and practices encompassing Europe,
Africa, and the Caribbean. He populates a vast canvas with unforgettable human
stories of brutality and resilience, shattering and adaptation, told with
meticulous care and clarity.”

One of Rushforth’s favorite
stories, he said, appears in the final chapter. It traces the lives of four
people, all enslaved in Montreal, and it “blurs a lot of the boundaries we
think about when we think of slavery.”

One of those is race. One of the
four, named Joseph, defies our conventional thinking on slavery as he
was owned by a man who had both French and Indian ancestors. Although his
master owned a farm, Joseph’s only use of the land was a barn he turned into the headquarters for
the master’s smuggling operation.

“He would move
smuggled goods around the island for his master, who would hire him out to
other smugglers,” Rushforth said. “Joseph became a very important part of this
ring of smugglers and traders who would sell illegal things, like alcohol, to
native people. They’d also sell unlicensed goods to circumvent taxes and
monopolies.

Joseph was handsomely rewarded for his role, but warned that if he were
caught, the master would accuse him of stealing and swear that Joseph was
acting on his own. That’s exactly what happened. French authorities attempted
to convince Joseph to turn on his master, but he never did.

“His life is
completely different from the type of slavery we imagine,” Rushforth said. “We
think of slavery as plantation labor, producing crops for sale. He was a slave,
but he was fairly free to move around the city. He had a fair amount of
autonomy. He had jobs that were typically urban, running errands around town,
engaging in trade. It’s not how we think of the institution.”

Rushforth is the third W&M faculty member to capture the award in the
last seven years, following Scott Nelson (“Steel Drivin’ Man,” 2006) and Cindy
Hahamovitch (“No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global
History of Deportable Labor,” 2012).